Constitution Class. Very interesting. This is stuff they they don’t teach you in school. Definitely worth your time. Really gives you something to think about.
In the early eighties Michael Badnarik started his career as a computer programmer at an Illinois nuclear power plant. For the past twenty years he has continued this professional course, but during this time he became interested and frustrated with politics. As a result, in 1983 Badnarik began studying the IRS and then the constitution. He had since condensed his 18 years of research into a short eight hour course that he would teach in a lecture format. It included some of the fundamentals on our rights and the foundations of our republic. A video recording of one of the classes has been made and you can watch it here..
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
The film’s basic premise is that the current scientific consensus on the anthropogenic causes of global warming has numerous scientific flaws, and that vested monetary interests in the scientific establishment and the media discourage the public and the scientific community from acknowledging or even debating this. The film asserts that the publicised scientific consensus is the product of a “global warming activist industry” driven by a desire for research funding. Other culprits, according to the film, are Western environmentalists promoting expensive solar and wind power over cheap fossil fuels in Africa, resulting in African countries being held back from industrialising.
A number of academics, environmentalists, think-tank consultants and writers are interviewed in the film in support of its various assertions. They include the Canadian environmentalist Patrick Moore, founding member of Greenpeace but for the past 21 years a critic of the organisation; Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Patrick Michaels, Research Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia; Nigel Calder, editor of New Scientist from 1962 to 1966; John Christy, professor and director of the Earth System Science Center at University of Alabama; Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute; the former British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson; and Piers Corbyn, a British weather forecaster.
The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and toassume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and
necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate
and pressing importance, unless suspended in their
operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so
suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation
of large districts of people, unless those people would
relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a
right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual,
uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their
public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into
compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for
opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of
the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to
cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers,
incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at
large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime
exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and
convulsions within.
He has endeavored to prevent the population of these
states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for
naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to
encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions
of new appropriations of lands.
He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing
his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.
He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the
tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their
salaries.
He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither
swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their
substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies
without the consent of our legislature.
He has affected to render the military independent of and
superior to civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction
foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our
laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for
any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants
of these states:
For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing taxes on us without our consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by
jury:
For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended
offenses:
For abolishing the free system of English laws in a
neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary
government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it
at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the
same absolute rule in these colonies:
For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable
laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our
governments:
For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring
themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all
cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of
his protection and waging war against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned
our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign
mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation
and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty
and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages,
and totally unworthy of the head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the
high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the
executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall
themselves by their hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has
endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the
merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is
undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and
conditions.
In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.
We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levey war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.
#teaparty
Here’s a great video from reason.tv that presents some amazing facts in just a couple of minutes.
Tax facts to make your head explode!
Is it patriotic to pay taxes? And if so, who the most patriotest Americans? Who are the least? How many words are in the tax code? How much do patriotic Americans pay to prepare their taxes? How long do you have to work in a year to earn enough to pay your taxes?
The answers to these and other questions add up to one big W-2 WTF.
Are you wondering why things aren’t improving, why you have that queasy feeling in your gut as you watch your fellow workers getting laid off. Are you losing sleep as you worry about what you will do if your position is the next to go?
The following column by Dick Morris may help you understand. Put yourself in the shoes of a business owner or CEO and see if you can relate.
More than anything else, business needs a predictable environment if it is to create jobs. Changes in the regulatory environment and the tax code make it almost impossible for businesses to make investments.
Yet President Obama seems to ignore this reality. Each day’s news brings another bold and far-reaching proposal to change the fundamentals of the US economy. And each time he indulges his personal ideology with such a pronouncement, businesses all over the world cut back on their planned investment until the dust settles. (more…)
Commentary by Caroline Baum
March 19 (Bloomberg) —
Somewhere John Galt is smiling.
The hero of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” is smiling because he’s seen it all before: the government’s intervention in the private sector; the constraints placed on business in the name of the people; the desperation on the part of government bureaucrats when they realize their leverage is limited; and — this part is still fiction — the decision on the part of business leaders to walk away from the enterprises they built.
That’s all I could think about when I read that American International Group Inc., recipient of $173 billion in taxpayer funds, was paying out $165 million in bonuses to employees of its financial-products group, the poster boy for risk and greed.
The Obama administration, Congress and the public are outraged taxpayer dollars are going to enrich the folks who got us into this mess. So am I.
Members of Congress want to blame Edward Liddy, the former chief executive officer of Allstate Corp., who was recruited by former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in September to steer AIG away from the shoals.
Liddy is paid $1 a year for his efforts. “My only stake is my reputation,” Liddy said in a March 16 open letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
His only crime, as far as I can tell, is inheriting compensation contracts providing for retention bonuses for certain AIG derivative traders, some of whom have left the company, and listening to lawyers on his options.
‘Directive 10-289’
Why should Liddy endure the public’s wrath for the sake of his reputation, which lawmakers will destroy in a heartbeat to save their own hides? Youwalkaway.com isn’t an option just for homeowners who owe more on their mortgage than their house is worth. (more…)
President Obama wants Congress to dramatically expand the burden of government spending. This CF&P Foundation mini-documentary explains why such a policy, based on the discredited Keynesian theory of economics, will not be successful. Indeed, the video demonstrates that Obama is proposing – for all intents and purposes – to repeat Bush’s mistakes. Government will be bigger, even though global evidence shows that nations with small governments are more prosperous.
Tags: bill, constitution, freedom, land, law, Michael Badnarik, police, rights, sovereignty
